Kategorie: Startups (Seite 1 von 2)

WeWork is more interested in sales than building a community. It’s increasingly for big corporates. And it shouldn’t be described as providing “coworking” spaces.

These are the words of Tobias Kremkau, the manager of St. Oberholz in Berlin, one of the oldest coworking spaces which is now expanding all over Germany.

They come as WeWork’s parent company this week filed paperwork to go public in the US, just months after raising money from Japan’s Softbank at a $47bn post-money valuation.

WeWork describes itself as providing more than “beautiful, shared office spaces” but a “community” and “a place you join as an individual, ‘me’, but where you become part of a greater ‘we’.”

Kremkau knows more about coworking spaces than pretty much anybody else in Europe. Travelling from Barcelona to Stockholm over two months with his wife in 2015, they worked from a different coworking space every day.

Condom-entrepreneur Waldemar Zeiler, the bearded founder of Berlin-based Einhorn Kondome, recently dressed up as a giant vulva to announce his company’s next goal to “unfuck menstruation”.

It was a high-impact stunt which has become characteristic of the 35-year-old as he takes Einhorn — which has been making vegan, sustainable and fair-trade condoms since 2015 — into the business of selling menstrual hygiene products.

When Einhorn first launched, attempting to make buying condoms cool and fun, it promised “up to 21 orgasms” from a pack of seven condoms. Customers seemed to like the idea, even if the German courts forced them to retract the actual claim.

With 12 guides, over 600 tours sold and plenty of positive reviews, Arzu Altinay’s company Walks in Istanbul was going well. Then the business started to go very wrong.

The political atmosphere in Turkey started to change around 2015 and there was a a bloody coup attempt a year later. Tourism dried up. Altinay, who had been a professional tour guide since 1998, lost the vast majority of her customers.

When PayPal stopped operating in Turkey in 2016, even those still wanting to pay for her tours couldn’t. “I was desperate because my business died immediately. I’m a single parent and had no money coming in.”

Altinay knew that she had to move her company outside of Turkey. “The business was working, it just wasn’t working in Istanbul”. weiterlesen →